Joseph Dietzgen

Eugene Dietzgen surveys his father's life. An artisan tanner who educated himself in philosophy and Marxism, befriending Marx & Engels (gaining a complementary mention in Capital), Joseph later came to the aid of the Chicago anarchists in the aftermath of the 1886 Haymarket bombing.
He published several works on his dialectical materialist philosophy and was later criticised by Lenin in his 'Materialism and Empirio-Criticism'.

The historic split between anarchism and socialism has had a debilitating effect on the workers movement, and Joseph Dietzgen was one of those individuals who sought to lessen the opposition of these tendencies. What he promoted was not an abstract reconciliation which failed to recognise real differences, although he held that these were in any case exaggerated, but a real reconciliation based on the transcending of opposition through the transformation and supersession of existing standpoints. From Radical Chains no.3

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